Posts Tagged ‘Ruth Wilson’

A few weeks ago, on the Nothern Line, while Phil was running his fingers along the lines of type in the Metro he noticed he was sitting next to a woman concentrating on a scriptwith all the “Mrs Elvsted” parts underlined. Suspecting it might be for the National’s Hedda Gablerhe went off and did a bit of internet stalking and discovered that it was Sinéad Matthews who takes that role in the this production.

Perhaps Phil should have torn her manuscript into pieces, scribbled notes all over it so that she could piece it back together again to get a better understanding of her role. To explain that would need a SPOILER ALERT. Of course if it had been Ruth Wilson (who plays this Hedda) next to him he’d have torched it for her. Read the rest of this entry »

They say you can’t be in two places at the same time, but obviously the Whingers can. You swanned off to the Edinburgh Festival and unlike last year, you haven’t even had the courtesy to send even a postcard.

Your departing instructions were to “mop the surrounds”: take in the Pinter you suggested or perhaps the Caryl Churchill. Thanks a bundle.

Then you handed me the much sought-after tickets for Anna Christie – hot presumably because Jude Law is in it and not because you’ve been holding them in clammy palms. And it is a Eugene O’Neill to boot (not a master of the art of brevity) while you’ll be seeing shows in Edinburgh that last what – an hour or less?

But what would you have made of it? In a Being John Malkovich sort of way I’m going to try the unthinkable and get inside your head and imaginge what you’d have made of it. Read the rest of this entry »

The happiness of the Whingers depends on a lot of things when they visit a theatre: good sightlines, brevity, amusement and a competitively priced bar. But unlike Blanche Dubois they do not seek or expect kindness from strangers (or friends for that matter). Indeed, it is a word that rarely features in their limited vocabularies.

Brevity may also have been in somewhat short supply at the Donmar Warehouse on Monday when we dropped in to see Rob Ashford‘s production of Tennessee Williams‘s Pulitzer Prize winning classic A Streetcar Named Desire: it lumbers in at at a massive three hours. But for once the Whingers had struck lucky in the advance booking ticket lottery that the Donmar organises for its “friends” and for the first time in yonks we weren’t sitting to the side of the thrust stage but at the front, where the critics get to sit (in fact Mark Lawson or his Doppelgänger was in front of us). And boy what a difference it made! Read the rest of this entry »